Yesterday I was at a Contemporary Landscape Painting workshop with Pippa. It was very stimulating, so I thought I’d pass the basics on.
We started by dividing a good sized piece of reasonably heavyweight cartridge paper into three rows and then making marks across each row with palette knife and undiluted acrylic paint. Desperately not thinking of landscapes we used a dark, medium and light colour in each, perhaps with a warm or cold colour relationship.
Make sure to leave a good quantity of white paper. On one row at least the dark should be black. The marks should overflow to give colour and texture subtleties. There should be slightly stronger areas of pigment and others could be almost scraped off. Don’t get too fussy.
Next take a small mount cut out and keep laying it over the paper to see if any interesting shapes or images emerge. You can twist the mount at whatever angle works. Pick as many images as you fancy playing with. They can’t overlap, as the next task is to cut them out and stick them to a sheet of paper to work on. In those bits you can think about landscape at last. You can paint over any bits that don’t work and add detail that adds more shape, distance and texture.
Lastly we did some larger (but still small for this exercise) pictures using the same stages on each piece of paper – Making flat marks in three colour shades, with different strengths, overlaps and textures. Doing it reminded me of Heather Burton’s advice to block in shapes quickly in flat colour at the start of a palette knife piece and the abstract session where we folded a paper that we had worked on to highlight different sections and stimulate new ideas.
The exercise aimed to give more liveliness to compositions. Using flat acrylics allows you to add layers of subtlety and detail afterwards.
